Extended abstract and bio:

Who moves freely? Who gets stopped? In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller traces how the regimes of power that govern movement produce inequality and differential mobilities at all levels. On a local level where the circulation of people, resources, and information privileges kinetic elites, while preventing access, displacing, and endangering the mobility poor. On an urban scale, with questions of public transport, "the right to the city," sustainable mobilities, and “green gentrification.” On the planetary level, where tourists and wealthy elites are able to roam freely, while migrants and those most in need are imprisoned at the borders, sent to islands of detention, or back to the zones of violence and climate disaster from which they tried to flee. The struggle for mobility justice must connect the body, street, city, nation, and planet; and can, potentially, forge new connections among social movements. This talk will offer an overview of the theory of mobility justice and of some of the movements that are currently working to advance the combined goals of sustainable transitions and mobility justice.

Mimi Sheller, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities and past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. She is author or co-editor of ten books, including Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2020); Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018); Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press, 2014); Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Duke University Press, 2012); Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (Routledge, 2003); and Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Macmillan Caribbean, 2000).

As co-editor with John Urry of Tourism Mobilities (2004) and Mobile Technologies of the City (2006) and author of numerous highly cited articles, she helped to establish the new interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. She was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa from Roskilde University, Denmark (2015). She has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Macarthur Foundation, the Mobile Lives Forum, and the Graham Foundation in Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She has held Visiting Fellowships at the University of Miami (2019); the Annenberg School of Communication at University of Pennsylvania (2016); the Penn Humanities Forum (2010); the Center for Mobility and Urban Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark (2009); Media@McGill, Canada (2009); the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2008); and Swarthmore College (2006-2009).